News

You can now run Microsoft SQL Server on Google Cloud Platform. All the major cloud providers support SQL Server, either with an IAAS or PAAS model, but the offerings have very different feature sets. Providing an attractive option for migrating SQL Server to the cloud seems to be a new focus for Google, Amazon and Microsoft.

In a recent blog post, Uber detailed why they have chosen to replace PostgreSQL with MySQL. In this article we present a high level overview of the problems they faced, how MySQL fares against them and some of the best rebuttals against the case presented by Uber.

AWS released an update to its Relational Database Service (RDS) that allows users to take advantage of native SQL Server backup and restore functionality. AWS beat Microsoft Azure to market with this capability which simplifies database migration and disaster recovery scenarios.

SQL Server 2005 has now officially hit its end of life. This means that it will no longer receive security updates and new vulnerabilities that are discovered will go unfixed. Yet a recent survey commissioned by Microsoft showed that 46% of companies using SQL Server had at least one production machine running SQL Server 2005.

Microsoft has dramatically changed the support policy for SQL Server. In the past, the policy was essentially "wait for a service pack unless you have a problem". Now they want developers to proactively Cumulative Updates.

Microsoft’s executive vice president of the cloud and enterprise group Scott Guthrie announced SQL Server is coming to Linux, thus once more confirming Microsoft’s new course on open source software. SQL Server will be generally available on Linux sometime mid 2017, with a private preview being available now.

A database query times out and you don’t know why. The estimated query plan is revealing the problem, so you remove the timeout entirely. An hour later it is still running and you are no closer to getting the actual execution plan. If only there was a way to find out what is actually happening inside the server. With Live Query Statistics in SQL Server 2016 you can now answer that question.

Data masking is a necessary, but error prone process. You only need to forget the mask one time to leak sensitive data. SQL Server 2016 attempts to address this with a feature called Dynamic Data Masking.

A common criticism for SQL Server’s security model is that it only understands tables and columns. If you want to apply security rules on a row-by-row basis, you have to simulate it using stored procedures or table value functions, and then find a way to make sure there is no way to bypass them. With SQL Server 2016, that is no longer a problem.